Like Luis Meléndez, Paret is one of the great artists who worked almost entirely without official commissions. For numerous reasons, his creative activity took place outside the court, and he was completely uninvolved in efforts to enliven the nation’s great art. His highly refined compositions were filled with grace and elegance and his choice of motives for his genre scenes reveals a true gift, making his paintings some of the finest documentation of the society of his time, with a poetic and admirably sensitive gaze. Born to a French father and a Spanish mother, he began studies at the Royal Academy of San Fernando and completed his artistic and literary education during a three-year stay in Rome. He served Charles III’s brother, the infante don Luis, and was eventually banished to Puerto Rico (1775-1778). For his cooperation in the prince’s gallant adventures. Upon returning to Spain he settled in Bilbao, as he was not allowed to enter Madrid until 1787.
Paret was Spain’s most rococo painter, but his work actually reached the beginning of a worthy and resolute neoclassicism. He seems to have studied both 18th-century Venetian and French painting, as his teacher, Charles de La Traverse, worked in Spain. His agreeable indoor scenes and his landscapes filled with small figures, as well as critical or picaresque costumbrista scenes, place him among the finest European painters of his century. Normally, they are very finely painted small-format canvases with vibrant colors. The fantasy and richness of his scenes are unparalleled in Spanish art and their splendid presentation is inimitable, making them jewel-like in both their details and overall views. Paret brought the same charm to both complex and straightforward compositions, as well as to non-narrative works, including small and appealing flower paintings.
Like many eighteenth-century artists, he was attracted to the theater, and to the spectacular costumes and masks of Carnival celebrations, as they allowed him a free hand in the exploration of motives that border on the world of dreams. The resulting works offer viewers a glimpse of eighteenth-century Spain’s customarily agreeable entertainments and pastimes—known through chronicles and portraits.
Paret’s views of Spain’s northern ports, religious and historical canvases, among others, and his designs for everything from altarpieces to fountains, reflect his extraordinarily active mind and his indefatigable creative imagination, as well as his skills as a draftsman and the irreproachable execution that made him one of eighteenth-century Europe’s most attractive artists (Luna, J. J.: El bodegón español en el Prado. De Van der Hamen a Goya, 2008, pp. 163-164).

His self-portrait at the Museo del Prado is catalogued as P07701.